A significant percentage of calls or communication attempts within a network fail for various reasons. One such frequent failure occurs during telephone calls on a landline or cellular phone network. As the delineation between phone networks and computer networks is increasingly blurred, however, similar types of incomplete communication failures occur on Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) systems, text and instant messaging systems, and hybrid systems that communicate over multiple systems. A communication attempt failure can occur for various reasons including when a call destination is busy, unavailable, or simply not answering.
Several solutions have been provided to facilitate completion of a failed communication attempt. These services are referred to as call completion services. Referring to FIG. 1, call completion services 100 can be broadly categorized into two major categories referred to as Caller in Charge of Call Completion Services (C4S) 101 and Destination in Charge of Call Completion Services (DC3S) 102.
One of the most popular of the DC3S 102 services is the voicemail service 110. Services such as voicemail can fulfill several purposes including call completion purposes. For example, voicemail may be used for the purpose of call completion when a caller leaves a message asking the destination to call the caller back. Voicemail can also be used for the purpose of simply conveying information to the destination.
Short Message Service (SMS) 111 is another service in the DC3S 102 category. Like voicemail service 110, SMS 111 can be used for the purpose of call completion when a caller sends a text message requesting the destination to call the caller back.
Yet another service in the DC3S 102 category is the “missed calls” service 112, which is integrated in the majority of handsets, and allows the destination to view a list of all callers that called while the destination was busy or available but not answering. A similar network service often referred to as the “who-called” or the “missed calls alert” service 113 allows the destination to receive a list of all callers that called while the destination was unavailable.
For services in the C4S 101 category, the caller maintains the responsibility of completing the call, rather than handing the responsibility to the destination. The main advantage of utilizing a service in the C4S 101 category is that the chance of a call actually being completed is much higher than with services in the DC3S 102 category since the caller in most instances is more committed to completing the call. The caller has a higher chance of completing the call with a service in the C4S 101 category since the destination may ignore a caller's initial efforts, be reluctant to accept expenses to complete the call, or otherwise communicate with the caller through a different information channel, such as through e-mail.
Services of the C4S 101 category can be further divided into two categories referred to as the C4S Call Back Services (CBS) 120 and the C4S Notify Back Services (NBS) 121.
Services in the NBS 121 category notify a caller at the first instance the desired destination is available or reachable. The caller may be notified via SMS, instant messaging, or via other services, but not via an actual call. One big disadvantage of services in the NBS 121 category is that notifications are non-synchronized. For example, at the time the notification is attempted, the caller may be unreachable. Hence, by the time the caller receives a notification of the availability or reachability of the destination, the notification may already be out of date.
Services in the CBS 120 category actually call back the caller to prompt the caller to complete the call. Services in the CBS 120 category include the Call Back for an initially-UNReachable destination service (CBUNR) 130 and the Call Back for an initially-Non-AnSWering service (CBNASW) 131. These types of services in the CBS 120 category have been disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 6,081,725 to Ishida, U.S. Pat. No. 6,804,509 to Okon et al., and U.S. patent application Ser. No. 09/930,383 by Okon et al. and are all incorporated herein by reference in their entireties.
Some or all of the aforementioned services may be subject to situations where multiple callers apply to the same or different call completion services for the same destination. In the prevailing state of the art, when several users request a call completion service for the same initially unreachable or non-answering destination, an ordinary queue is utilized and therefore, callers are handled by the service in the order in which the callers applied for the call completion service. Hence, the current system is inflexible and may not provide call completion services in the order that is most desirable.
What is needed is a way to manage and handle a plurality of callers registered to the same or different call completion service for the same destination to execute call completion attempts in an order that is more desirable to callers and destinations.